What, Like, Makes Language Change?Language sows its own seeds of change, and social context
offers fertile ground for its growth and spread. Walt
Wolfram
explains that language changes differently than we may think.
It’s not the media;
it’s the middle class. Read
Summary.

Twenty-five years ago, speakers who used like in she’s
like, “Don’t leave the house!” were largely confined to Southern
California and strongly associated with a stereotypical Valley Girl way
of speaking. Today, the specialized use of like to introduce a
quote (what linguists call the “quotative like”) has
spread throughout the English-speaking world. The rapid, expansive
spread of “quotative like” among speakers under the age of 40
is truly exceptional. It also raises important questions about the
nature of language change.

The common myth in American society is that the English language is
now following a single path of change under the irrepressible,
homogenizing influence of mass media. However, the truth is that
language is far too resourceful and social structure far too
complicated to follow any single path.

Language changes subtly…women often lead the way

Change is one of the inevitable facts in the life of any language. The
only language not in a perpetual state of flux is a dead language.
Language itself provides the seeds of change, and social circumstances
provide fertile ground for their growth and spread. Yet the truth about
language change may be different from the popular conception. People
often assume that change begins with the upper class, modeling language
for other social groups to follow. In fact, most language change starts
subtly and unconsciously among middle-class speakers and spreads to
other classes — and women often lead the way.

Pressure to change comes both from within language itself and from
its role in society. Because language is a highly patterned code for
communication, people collectively pressure it to change in ways that
preserve its patterning or enhance its communicative efficiency. (More
on this later.) At the same time, we use language as a social behavior,
to solidify or separate different social groups.

The Social Context of Change

Social context, including the social evaluation of language
differences, is as important in language change as the inner workings
of language. The reason that oxen has not yet given way to oxes
throughout the English language cannot be found within language itself,
but in the social sanctions that have been placed on the use of this
form by socially dominant groups. By the same token, one can only
speculate as to why mouses (as in, "We asked the IT
department to order some new mouses") would become an acceptable
plural for a computer device by the same middle-class speakers who
resolutely chastise any speaker who might call rodents mouses.
Social evaluation of language may seem inconsistent and arbitrary, but
this does not lessen its role in language change.

Most language change actually starts subtly and unconsciously among
the lower classes and spreads. Extremes in social strata, for example,
the highest and the lowest classes, tend to be marginal to this
process. Instead, the middle-class groups, who have the strongest
loyalty to the local community while being connected to other groups,
are the most sensitive to language innovation.

The other side of language innovation is resistance

On the other side of language innovation lies resistance. Even when
certain changes seem natural and reasonable, they are resisted by
socially dominant classes who want to avoid being affiliated with
subordinate groups that have already adopted these changes. The
regularization of irregular past forms such as knowed and growed
or the regularization of such as hisself and theirselves,
which have made some inroads among vernacular speakers of English, tend
to be resolutely resisted by the middle classes despite their
linguistic reasonableness. Higher-status groups may often suppress
natural changes taking place in lower-status groups to maintain their
social distinction through language. The acceptance and rejection of
language changes are constrained by the social interpretation of those
changes and the relationships that exist among social groups.

The Spread of Language Change

Language change can spread via several paths. In American society,
one prominent pattern of language change is the cascade or hierarchical
model, in which change starts in heavily populated metropolitan areas
that serve as cultural focal points. From these areas, the change
spreads first to moderately sized cities that fall under the influence
of these urban areas, and then to yet smaller cities and communities,
affecting the rural areas lastly. The Northern Cities Vowel Shift is
following this pattern of diffusion, which is facilitated by the
cultural status of metropolitan areas and by the more extended social
networks of cities with larger populations.

Other paths of diffusion in language change show that it is not
simply a matter of population dynamics. In Oklahoma, for example, the
structure fixin’ to for ‘intend to’ in a sentence such as They’re
fixin’ to move has spread from its rural roots to larger urban
areas rather than the converse. This contrahierarhical model of change
is explained in terms of cultural identity and trends in population
movement. As more non-Southerner transplants move to large cities in
Oklahoma, native residents want to assert their Southern identity to
distinguish themselves from outsiders. By adopting a language feature
associated with rural Southern speech, natives can counteract the
influx of the newer transplants through this symbolic use of language.

A third diffusion pattern follows a wave-like pattern in
geographical space. In this instance, the pattern of diffusion is
explained primarily in terms of physical distance — the farther the
location is from the site of the innovation, the later the change will
take place. The merger of the vowels in field and filled
or steal and still in some areas of the South
illustrates this pattern of contagious diffusion.

Different diffusion patterns are not necessarily exclusive; they may
co-exist in the same region depending on the language differences
involved. Population dynamics, social structure and the social meaning
ascribed to changing structures help us to understand the paths of
language change.

Language Change and the Media

Is the media homogenizing English?

It is sometimes assumed that the language of the media is homogenizing
English. After all, everyone watches the same television networks, in
which a dialectally neutral English has become the norm. Doesn’t this
common exposure affect language change and the level of dialect
differences? It can be quite difficult to assess the precise role of
the media in language change, but a couple of observations are
appropriate.

Although TV shows have clearly contributed some words to the
vocabulary and facilitated the rapid spread of some popular
expressions, including perhaps the use of quotative like, media
influence is greatly exaggerated because people do not model their
everyday speech after media personalities with whom they have no
interpersonal interaction. In ordinary, everyday conversation, most
people want to talk like their friends and acquaintances.

Commonplace conversation, interpersonal interaction and social
networks are the venues through which language change takes place, not
impersonal media characters. Furthermore, the current evidence on
language change and variation indicates that language diversity is
alive and well. Some historically isolated dialects are receding due to
outside influences, but other dialects are intensifying and
accelerating in their rate of language change. If the media were so
influential, that wouldn’t happen. Part of this trend toward
maintaining diversity is due to the fact that language change is
inevitable. And part of it may be due to a renewed sense of place and
region that attaches social meaning to some of the language changes
taking place in American society.

The Nuts & Bolts of Change and the Language System

Languages are highly patterned cognitive systems. Within the system
of English, irregular noun plurals such as oxen for the plural
of ox and sheep for the plural of sheep go
against the dominant grain of forming the plural by adding –s or
–es, creating pressure to change these plurals to oxes
and sheeps. Vernacular dialects throughout the English-speaking
world have succumbed to this linguistic tendency even as standard
English has withstood this internal pressure.

At the same time, the plural of mouse — mouses —
would have seemed unthinkable to any standard English speaker a few
decades ago, but this regularized plural is now commonly used to refer
to the hand-held computing device, as in “We purchased new mouses
for all of our computers.” Over time and place, language itself will
pressure exceptions into conforming with dominant patterns.

The mind organizes language in a way that predisposes it
to certain types of change

There is also pressure to expand patterns of application. Lexical items
(words), for example, tend to extend their meaning to cover new
references; grammatical forms tend to become more general in their
application. The term holiday, once limited to a religious
event, now refers to any day away from work. In a similar way, the
shape associated with the nautical vessel submarine was
extended to refer to the fast-food sandwich based on the shape of the
roll wrapped around the contents. The use of the word like to
introduce a quote as in, “He’s like, What are you doing?” simply
extends this grammatically versatile word, already used as a noun,
verb, adverb, adjective and conjunction, to set off quoted statements.
The human mind organizes language and uses it to communicate thought in
a way that predisposes it to certain types of change.

Change within language is also shaped by our ability to produce and
perceive language sounds. The sound of th in think and that,
for example, is more difficult to produce and to perceive than the t
of tea or the d of dip, one of the reasons that
th is not nearly as common in the world’s languages as t
or d. Not surprisingly, throughout the English-speaking world,
the th sounds show phonetic variation and change, with
pronunciations that range from t or d (tink for think,
dat for that) to f or v (baf for bath,
brover for brother). Similarly sequences of consonant
sounds such mpt in attempt or sts in tests
are much more phonetically complex than a single consonant at the end
of a word (top or this), and therefore subject to change
over time and geographical space.

Sounds may also change based on their relation to other sounds in
the system. Vowels, for example, are primarily differentiated from one
another by where the tongue is positioned in the mouth, somewhat like
the different sounds created by whistling into bottles filled with
various amounts of water. A slight shift in the position in one vowel
closer to the position of another vowel may make it more difficult to
hear the difference between the neighboring vowels, triggering one of
two effects. It may create a domino-like effect, a chain shift, among a
series of vowels in which other vowels move to preserve phonetic
distance between them, or it may cause adjacent vowels to merge and
become one sound. Both chain shifts and mergers have played an
important role in past and present-day changes in English language
vowels.

One important chain shift taking place in the vowels of American
English, the Northern Cities Vowel shift (in Chicago, Detroit,
Cleveland, Syracuse, Rochester and more), involves the sound of coffee
shifting so that it is produced more like (though not identical to) the
sound of cot. This in turn triggers a shift in the
pronunciation of a word like pop so that it is produced more
like pap, which, in turn, triggers a shift in the pronunciation
of bat so that it sounds a bit more like bet. But the
shift doesn’t end there, as the sound of bet moves back, closer
to the sound of butt, and the sound of butt moves
closer to that of bought, the place vacated by the original
shift of the vowel in bought or caught. This shift of
the vowels in the mouth looks somewhat like the following rotation.

This subtle and
elaborate shift in vowel production is not
conscious, but rather the natural outcome of the rotational force of
vowels. Meanwhile, Southern vowels rotate in a completely different
format, resulting in growing divergence in the vowels of Southern and
Northern speech in the United States.

Vowels also shift by merging into one sound. In Eastern New England,
including Boston, and in most of the Western United States, a shift in
vowels of caught and cot and dawn and Don
has resulted in their identical production. Similarly, before a nasal
sound, the vowel of pin and pen are merged in the
South. Though there may be different responses to the movement of
vowels, it is natural for them to shift their position over time,
affecting other vowels. Though often unnoticed, language change is by
guided the pressures of the language system working in tandem with
societal divisions that assign social meaning to these changes.

Suggested Reading/Additional Resources

Walt Wolfram is the William
C. Friday
Distinguished Professor at North Carolina State University, where he
directs the North Carolina Language and Life Project. He has pioneered
research on social and ethnic dialects since the 1960s, publishing 16
books and more than 250 articles on language varieties such as African
American English, Latino English, Appalachian English, and Southern
Vernacular English. Wolfram is deeply involved in the application
of sociolinguistic information and the dissemination of knowledge about
dialects to the public. In this connection, he has been involved in the
production of TV documentaries, museum exhibits, and other
community-based dialect awareness initiatives; he also served as
primary linguistic consultant for the Children's Television Workshop,
the producers of Sesame Street. He has served as President of
the Linguistic Society of America, the American Dialect Society, and
the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics.